There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

PHP Is Like A Handgun?

PHP is like a handgun. On its own, it is simply an inanimate tool that has no moral leaning. In the hands of a responsible citizen, it can be used to the benefit of society. But in the hands of someone who is untrained or mentally unstable, it can be used to commit horrible atrocities.

Whenever there's such a tragedy, other developers are quick to blame PHP. If PHP were illegal, then Yahoo! would never have happened. If we regulated PHP tightly, then there would be no Digg.

There is some truth in that though… We have WP because a few people mishandled PHP due to their mental instabilities (think splatter gun), and that is no laughing matter.

For the wider PHP community, it is unfortunate to be polite about it – us responsible developers who are educated to a high degree have to deal with sh*t like WP at one point or another during our careers.

People who develop like that [WP] are an embarrassment to the rest of us, tarnishing our good name and endevours.

PHP is like a handgun. On its own, it is simply an inanimate tool that has no moral leaning. In the hands of a responsible citizen, it can be used to the benefit of society. But in the hands of someone who is untrained or mentally unstable, it can be u…

The handgun analogy is pretty harsh. Regardless of training and experience, or whether you are a “good” guy or a “bad” guy, a handgun’s only purpose is to harm. Maybe PHP is more like a Swiss Army knife. Packed full of awesomeness, and can perform a plethora of functions, but not without risk of cutting off your finger. I would only let my 6-year old handle a pocket knife after I showed her how to use it properly and taught her about the risks. PHP development may be similar. You probably shouldn’t let an inexperienced PHP developer work on mission-critical systems. However, you should let them learn in development environments. And, experienced developers should foster the learning. Currently, I think the PHP community does a pretty good job of this. Just like the Swiss Army knife that incorporates a locking blade, PHP itself seems to be getting safer too. Not sure how that applies to Microsoft and the Azure platform.

The original article is written by an old-school blow hard. PHP is a dirty implement – sure, but it’s success is down to it’s widespread distribution. Sure, PHP is not elegant, not suited to the ‘enterprise’ – but it beats the pants off of Ruby or Django when it comes to web deployment.

With the help of Sean and twenty-four fantastic authors from the PHP community, PHP Advent is back for a third year.
Paul gets things started with an article on comprehensible code:
Reading code is hard work. Here are some reasons why, along with some …